‘Sunshine’: Feel the burn

Those were two recurring thoughts as I watched “Sunshine” Saturday night at the Bijou. Danny Boyle’s new sci-fi adventure, which concerns a desperate mission to jump-start the prematurely dying sun with a mongo nuclear bomb and save mankind, is one of the brighest and darkest films I’ve ever seen.

For a dying star, the sun was sure bright enough. So much so, I had a passing worry about retinal damage from staring at the screen for two hours. I thought, shouldn’t we be watching this movie indirectly — you know, with those cardboard devices we were supposed to use for safe viewing of solar eclipses? Maybe the box from one of the Bijou’s pizzas would have worked.

Unfortunately, my group of movie buffs didn’t arrive until five minutes after the film had started, so a food order was out of the question. Fortunately, after the movie, we found a guy who had already seen it four times — a neat trick, considering it only opened Friday — and who filled us in on what we had missed.

Give Boyle credit. With some directors, you know what to expect. With Michael Bay, you’ll get something explosive and over the top. M. Night Shyamalan can be counted on for something weird and spooky. But Boyle has given us everything from the surreal heroin nightmare “Trainspotting” to the Leo DiCaprio star vehicle “The Beach” to the delightful kid adventure “Millions” to the rage-virus infected “28 Days Later.” Obviously, he’s not interested in making the same movie twice, which is a godsend in this summer of franchises.

The ad in last week’s Weekender contains this “Sunshine” tout from Glenn Whipp of the New York Daily News — “a great sci-fi film in the ‘Alien’ tradition.” That’s a bit misleading. The “Alien” tradition (which the “Sunshine” characters jokingly refer to in one of the film’s few funny moments) suggests crew members being picked off one by one. Without giving too much away, there is a malevolent presence involved (one critic called it a “bogeyman”), but his impact on the body count is nowhere near that of the ol’ slobbering beast that Sigourney Weaver fought in her underwear.

Instead, “Sunshine” is a study of a crew of pros desperately trying to complete its mission while dealing with one calamity after another. The story line is occasionally hard to follow — you’ll wish you had the guy who’s seen it four times on call to answer questions. And I agree with Larry Ratliff — the ending tries too hard to dazzle us. But the visuals are a spectacular mix of fire and ice, and the characters aren’t your usual batch of cliched misfits.

Although as their ship, the Icarus II, approached its fiery orange destination, I was thinking a better title would have been “Sunscreen.”